The Time Machine

I know, I know, another one already. I either seem to go through books like mad, or not at all.

This was an interesting book from several different viewpoints. The first is that today we see what last century envisioned for our future. Wells tended towards a more idealistic, although not perfect, view of how the world would develop, whereas today, many of our futuristic visions tend to be more industrialist and doom/gloom than idealistic. His version also didn’t include space travel, which for us seems to be a given. The second is that although he could travel in time, it was still a fairly linear type of travel. The Time Traveller moved in time, but not space, so whenever he went was simply the same place in space only a different time. It’s nothing like the Tardis which goes through virtually every dimension. Finally, it was all fairly simplistic in both design and execution. There were no mentions of how the machine was powered, how it was built, the materials were nothing that weren’t widely used in the rest of life and no sort of special protection was used for the traveller himself. Since his time, we’ve moved on to make things much more complicated and realistic, which is logical considering our standpoint in relation to travel in general, space or otherwise.

Wells seemed less interested in plot in this book than in making the reader confront the future from a different standpoint. In his version of the distant future, humans have become so intelligent that they no longer needed their intelligence and therefore reverted to an almost pacifistic, childlike innocence. It’s an interesting thought. Usually we consider the future to be a place of advancement in which humans become more intelligent and more advanced, yet retain the negative sides of the human character as well. Wells assumes that humans will eventually reach the point where they become so intelligent that their baser characteristics will be abandoned, leaving humans happy and carefree, obviating the need for intellectual and material advancement thus leading humanity to a happier, but less industrial future. He does avoid making the future a utopia by introducing enemies, however, these enemies are not fought, but feared and avoided, a war being out of the question as it would render the humanistic advances null and void with its necessity of learning how to cause destruction and death.

All in all an interesting book with more thought food than plot.

The Invisible Man by H.D. Wells

I think I read this book for the first time in the 5th grade. The idea intrigued me and I expected it to be a little more spectacular than it really is. Not that it isn’t a good book, but it’s not what a child would expect. It certainly isn’t the comic book version that a child would expect. It’s much too realistic for that. His character, Griffen, an albino scientist, manages to create a process by which he can cause the light to refract off objects in a way which renders the object invisible. Griffen performs this operation on himself before he realizes all the disadvantages to being invisible. Once in that state, he finds that he must either walk around naked, problematic in winter, or he must cover himself from head to toe all of the time, which is nigh on impossible. He can no longer stay in his home nor hold down a job due to this and is forced to wander the countryside looking for the means to get by, by either honest or mostly dishonest means. After creating havoc in one small town, he moves on and finds an old friend, who might have been able to help him. However, by this time, Griffen is already half mad and has begun to plan to create a reign of terror, with which he sees no moral problem. Kemp, his friend, decides he needs to be stopped and eventually succeeds.

Wells must have put quite a lot of thought into what it would be like to be invisible before writing this book. He brings up things like the dirty feet and eating food, which would remain visible as long as it was undigested, that I wouldn’t have thought of. Although he could have carried it all a bit further than he did by pointing out that dirt clinging to the feet alone would have made the feet, or the outline thereof, visible.

Still, he manages to make the situation real and bring home the terrible loneliness that being invisible would cause. The only question I have at the end of the book is if Griffen really did go mad from being invisible or was he already mad by the time he created the process. He frankly didn’t seem very stable from the beginning and I think that being invisible just tipped him over the edge.

Interesting read.